


like alien clones do

by thimbleoflight



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, i just really like out of the loop aus, out of the loop au no. 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-06-26 17:37:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15668025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thimbleoflight/pseuds/thimbleoflight
Summary: In which Isabel Lovelace wakes up on one of the Day 1093s to discover an extra on their space station: Alana Maxwell has returned, with no memory of her death. Isabel and Alana shortly come to terms with the fact that Alana is another duplicate, but what does that mean for the time loop?And how can Isabel reconcile the fact that Alana, who is definitely still her enemy, is the only person on the space station who's capable of figuring out what's going on, or even of understanding what Isabel herself is going through?Warnings for canon-levels of violence, references to canon manipulation (specifically regarding Hera).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now with a [playlist!](https://playmoss.com/en/oswinodinson/playlist/like-alien-clones-do-3)

_Too bad you killed the only person on this damn station smart enough to figure it out_ , Jacobi’d said, this time around.

He was right, and she hated it.

Not only for the way that it made Minkowski wince (as if Jacobi hadn’t been trying to kill the four of them at that very moment, as if they hadn’t succeeded in killing Hilbert), but the way that Eiffel winced too, the way that, if, for just a second, she’d thought she’d kind of even gotten Jacobi to feel like he was on their team—just for a second, the way that he bantered in the kitchen with Eiffel over coffee.

Maxwell had been better at this than any of them, and she might’ve been the enemy but with everyone’s lives on the line—

* * *

 

 

When she woke in the morning—day 1093, _whoop de fucking doo_ —she hit the snooze on her alarm, because why the hell not, if it was just going to be the same as every single other day, and made her way down to the kitchen, where everyone seemed to have already gathered. Minkowski was arguing with Eiffel over something, and Jacobi was—in the middle of it, and Hera was—

“Ow!” said Jacobi, as Isabel walked into the kitchen.

There was a snide laugh, from a voice that Isabel didn’t immediately recognize as Minkowski’s or Hera’s, so she turned around to give whichever one of them it was a piece of her mind, as their commanding officer. What the hell were they thinking, anyway, antagonizing the prisoner?

And she felt her heart drop out of her chest, only to be replaced by cold fear and fury. It wasn’t Minkowski. It wasn’t Hera.

“Told you,” sang Maxwell, and Jacobi made a face at her. Maxwell’s long hair, which she never tied up, floated around her face, and, as it had in life, it gave her the eerie impression that she was underwater.

Was this a bad dream?

“Ohh, no,” said Isabel, “oh no, oh no—why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Uh, your rotation’s not till noon, Cap?” said Eiffel, as if the dead weren’t fucking walking in their god damn mess hall.

Isabel took a moment to process this, which was difficult through the blinding headache, the outrage that not even Minkowski had thought to wake her up for this, that day 1093 was still repeating itself—

And Maxwell, staring at her like she’d lost her mind.

“Wake you up for what?” she asked.

“ _You_ ,” said Isabel, fully aware that this was a bad idea, but hey, who fucking cared, maybe they’d look around tomorrow and no one would remember anything and _Hilbert_ would be back and nothing would have changed. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

There was a terrible silence, thick like smoke, heavy as rain. This was maybe not the best way to have gone about this.

“Whoa,” said Minkowski, “what’s going on here?”

“What do you mean, I was supposed to be dead?” asked Maxwell.

“You guys don’t remember?” Isabel asked.

“Bad dream, Cap?” suggested Eiffel, in a way that suggested that he neither thought that Isabel was correct nor that she’d had a bad dream.

“Where’s Hilbert?” tried Isabel, just in case, because at least if Hilbert was back then the numbers were back to what they’d been, and it was three against five.

“Oh, are we playing Questions Only?” asked Maxwell.

“Hilbert’s... dead,” said Minkowski. “Remember? The bomb? We had a funeral? And they shot you, and—”

“And Maxwell,” said Lovelace. “And I came back, and Maxwell... didn’t.”

Maxwell shivered, and silence fell over the room again. Everyone still kept staring at Isabel, which, frankly, was normally not weird, given that she was their captain, but she was beginning to get a feel for the times when she was being stared at because she was the captain giving orders, and times that she was being stared at for Weird Alien Stuff, and this was one of the Weird Alien Stuff times.

“So you’re saying...” said Maxwell.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Isabel. “But everyone remembers you, so...”

“I mean, I remember you waking up at your funeral—” said Maxwell, and, that was weird, because Isabel didn’t have the memory of Maxwell being there. “I remember what happened after. The Tiamat tapes? And Kepler and I talked about binary, and potential communication, and how all my notes weren’t going to be—”

She fell silent, as the others nodded.

Isabel shook her head, and had that dizzying, nauseating feeling of a migraine—head swimming, as if she felt the shaking of her own head at two different speeds.

“You weren’t,” said Isabel.

“I remember her being there,” said Jacobi, and, as Eiffel murmured his assent, Isabel turned to Minkowski.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I do too.”

“Hera?” asked Isabel, desperately, “Hera, do you remember Maxwell getting shot?”

“N-no,” said Hera, “I’m sorry, Captain. I can play you the video.”

Isabel Lovelace had not always been a woman who could recognize a losing battle, but today, she was.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Also, this is the 15th time this day has repeated, and Maxwell hasn’t been there for any of them yet, so...”

“Captain?” said Hera. “Maybe you should... go back to bed. Take today off. Jacobi can help Minkowski with the coil compressor.”

Isabel rolled her eyes.

“I’m not going back to bed. I can help with the coil compressor. Okay? It’s the star. It’s messing with us... Okay, I can tell when you’re all looking at each other. I am standing _right here_.”

“Why don’t you... go back to bed for a bit, Cap,” said Eiffel. “Wake up at noon for your rotation, get some rest.”

“I hate to say it, but Eiffel’s right,” said Minkowski. “Honestly, Captain, you don’t look so good.”

“...If I can interject?” said Maxwell.

Everyone, all at once, turned to look at her.

“I’m very curious about what Captain Lovelace was saying regarding the 15th time this day has repeated.”

Isabel covered her eyes with her hands, and shook her head.

“Headache?” said Maxwell. “Captain, if I may offer my expertise later, perhaps we could meet. If you aren’t too afraid to talk to a ghost, of course.”

Isabel glanced through her fingers, caught the glimpse of a sharp smile on Maxwell’s face.

“I’m gonna go back to bed,” she announced. “Maxwell. You, me, 13 o’clock. After I help Minkowski.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“You think it’s going to be that quick—?” asked Minkowski.

“I know it is,” said Isabel, and shut the door behind her. 

* * *

 

The coil compressor went as quickly as she’d anticipated— _wow, I didn’t know you were so good with this, Captain_ —and Isabel found her way back to Maxwell’s cell, where Maxwell was currently contemplating the ceiling.

“You’re coming with me,” said Isabel, and Maxwell followed her out the door, down the halls of the ship.

“Captain?” Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Hera, as they crossed the threshold of the Urania.

“It’s fine, Hera,” said Isabel. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, send Minkowski after me.”

They settled, once they were far enough into the Urania, in a storage closet. Isabel had debated the armory—she’d never gotten to see it, after all, in all her time as the armsmaster, or the control room—but either place was likely to give Maxwell the opportunity for a weapon that Isabel wasn’t willing to give her. And Isabel didn’t know the Urania well enough to trust herself to hold her own.

Everything on it looked cleaner, somehow, than the Hephaestus. There was something very old-fashioned about the way that the Hephaestus’s panels were joined together, all metal bolts, the kind of thing you could imagine being hammered into place, where the Urania had joins between each panel that were nearly invisible. The Hephaestus itself was a dark gray color, where the Urania’s panels were all white. The door handles were smoother and rounder—

God, they’d really sent them up there with crap equipment.

Isabel tried not to let that old resentment bubble up again. It wasn’t necessary right now. She wasn’t the old Isabel Lovelace, she was the new Isabel Lovelace, whoever that was, and she was going to figure this out.

“All right,” said Isabel. “So, I wanna talk.”

“So good of you to invite me out,” said Maxwell. “Ooh, I feel like a supervillain. So. Days repeating. The dead returning.”

“That’s the gist of it,” said Isabel.

Nothing _looked_ different about Maxwell. Granted, Isabel had never paid a lot of attention to her before. She’d always given Isabel the impression of youngness, though of course, that couldn’t be the case. She had mousy hair, and a sweet, charming smile, with a little bit of a gap between her front teeth. Freckles. She wondered if they were all in the same place. She wondered if anyone would notice the difference.

“You think I’m just like you.”

Isabel froze. 

“Honestly, I haven’t had that much time to think about it,” she said. “But... yes. I think you’re like me. I don’t know why the hell else I’d let you out to roam with Jacobi, except that it wasn’t me and our _friends_  on the other side of the star are just trying to come up with a plausible story to keep both of us free on the ship.”

Maxwell shrugged.

“You’re not very good at this,” she said. “You might’ve led some guerilla warfare against Goddard on this station before, but you never actually managed a coup. That’s not your fault, of course.”

Isabel stared at her.

“What, have you got pointers for me?”

“Sure,” said Maxwell. “Don’t take your enemy out alone to a scene they’re more familiar with. Fortunately for you, unless I’ve got a gun in my hand I’m not Jacobi or Kepler in a combat scenario. Or at least, leave the handcuffs on.”

“Hold your hands out,” said Isabel, and Maxwell did, giving her a wide grin.

Isabel handcuffed her again.

“Smart move,” said Maxwell.

“Only one way to test it,” said Maxwell, and Isabel’s jaw dropped, thinking of the gunshot that had rung out, over the walkie-talkies, that awful, terrible moment—

“ _No!_ ”

(It was kind of a weird reaction, when she thought about it later.)

Maxwell raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t want to try getting Colonel Kepler’s psi-wave regulator up and running again?”

“Oh,” said Isabel. “Yeah.”

Maxwell laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that could make anyone else want to laugh, too. Her nose crinkled, and her eyes shut—

Isabel didn’t laugh.

“Let’s go for it.”

* * *

 

“Who shot Maxwell?” asked Minkowski. “In the world that you can remember.”

Isabel shivered.

She’d known this question would be coming and she’d let Minkowski corner her anyway, she’d let Minkowski take the lead in putting together the compressor coil. She could’ve made Eiffel do this.

(No, she thought, looking at the compressor coil. She really couldn’t. She really couldn’t let Eiffel do this, because they’d all die.)

And she couldn’t blame Minkowski. She’d want to know, too. The compressor coil grated against the sides of the engine, a horrible, metallic shriek. Minkowski was doing something wrong, because it hadn’t made that noise yesterday. Isabel itched to fix it, but with the way that Minkowski was looking at it, she couldn’t bear to bring herself to pull it away from Minkowski. It looked like concentrating on fixing the engine was the only damn thing that was preventing Minkowski from getting sick.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” said Isabel. “It’s fine.”

It wasn’t like telling her would mean anything, anyway. She’d just forget tomorrow.

But Isabel didn’t want to see the look on her face when she told her. It had been bad enough, to know that Minkowski had done it, it would be worse, somehow, she thought, to see the realization on her... friend’s face.

“No,” said Minkowski. “No, I really want to know. Who shot Maxwell?”

She asked it again as if repeating the question would make Isabel more likely to answer, and Isabel shook her head.

“Didn’t happen, right?”

“It was bad,” said Isabel, “Kepler had me and Eiffel in the Urania’s armory, and you had Maxwell in the Hephaestus’s bridge.”

Minkowski went white.

“Kepler counted down. He did eenie-meenie, like the fucking sadist that he is,” said Isabel, “over the speakers. And it landed on Eiffel.”

“I remember that,” said Minkowski.

“What happened next?”

“He shot you.”

Yeah, that was right. Isabel remembered the sound of it, and nothing else. She barely remembered waking up, and what she did remember of waking up was flashes of childhood cartoons, she remembered her parents’ faces and she remembered impossible smells, her mother’s cooking, she remembered flashes of songs, she remembered the way that her childhood dog’s fur felt under her hands, the way that an itchy dress her mother had made her wear slipped over her head.

She had vividly hallucinated a whole life, in the moment believing that it was the last thing she was seeing before she died. Now, she knew that it was a life that she had never lived, as much as it was, in a sense, her true birth.

That was what she remembered. It had hurt like hell, and yet every piece of it had been so familiar that her memories of the moment were of the warmth of it rather than the pain.

“What did you do?”

“Froze,” breathed Minkowski, as if she couldn’t help herself. “I froze.”

There was an ache in Isabel’s chest when she thought about it, when she saw the look in Minkowski’s eyes and the way that they shone, when she heard the crack in Minkowski’s voice.

“Then, you’re the one that froze,” said Isabel, “and the one I know wishes that she was you.”

Minkowski exhaled.

“I really did it. They said I couldn’t—”

“They were right,” said Isabel. “ _You_ didn’t.”

Minkowski swallowed. 

“It’s just luck,” she whispered, “I—I think I could have, if it had happened just a second before, or a second after, I maybe—I maybe would have. My hands were shaking so bad, anything would’ve made me jump...”

Isabel shrugged.

“It wasn’t like you,” said Isabel, finally. “It wasn’t like her, either, and I wish she hadn’t done it.”

Minkowski turned around and promptly threw up into the nearest trash bin.

“Whoa! Whoa, hey,” said Isabel, pushing forward to grab Minkowski and hold her hair back, “you okay?”

“No,” croaked Minkowski.

Yeah, this was why she hadn’t wanted to do this.

“It’s okay,” said Isabel, “you didn’t.”

“But I thought about it—I thought about it for days,” said Minkowski, wiping her mouth, “I felt it, in my hand, and I couldn’t not feel it—”

“Hey, hey,” said Isabel, “c’mon.”

Oh, boy.

“I was so close,” said Minkowski.

“Yep,” said Isabel, “and I was pretty close to killing Kepler, too. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” said Minkowski. “Oh, god, sorry I threw up.”

Minkowski had done her best, but vomiting in microgravity could only be so contained.

“It’s okay,” said Hera, “I’ve got a vent there, and I’m not going to have any sort of sympathetic reaction if I try to clean it up—you two just get out of there, for a sec.”

Isabel considered it, and realized that she was going to have a sympathetic reaction of her own, if they didn’t do what Hera said, and she ushered Minkowski out of the room. Once in the hallway, Minkowski took a few deep breaths.

“Sorry you had to see that,” she said, suddenly.

“Hey, it’s okay,” said Isabel, “it happens.”

“It’s just—”

“Yeah,” said Isabel. “I know.”

The compressor coil didn’t get fixed that night.

It didn’t matter anyway, of course.

* * *

 

It took Kepler’s aid to get the psi-wave regulator up and running again. Stupid, really. They should’ve known how to do it themselves. They shouldn’t have had to rely on him, but they did.

Isabel had needed to very cautiously divide her resources. Eiffel could not be trusted to guard Kepler—that much, they’d already found out, and she couldn’t have Minkowski away from her. The psi-wave regulator would knock her out, too, which meant that the best bet was for Kepler, Minkowski, Maxwell, and Eiffel to work on the psi-wave regulator, test it on Maxwell—

And for Isabel to guard Jacobi.

“But I wanna be part of the action...” whined Jacobi, and Isabel hung out outside the door. “Man, what a crazy day, huh?”

“Yep,” said Isabel, “and it’s just gonna start all over again when we go to sleep tonight, but hey, at least I’ll know, right?”

Jacobi was quiet for a moment.

“So you weren’t joking. That’s five bucks I’m out.”

Isabel shook her head, then remembered Jacobi couldn’t see her.

“No.”

“Maxwell, dead? Man, never knew Minkowski had it in her.”

“Maxwell didn’t think she was going to do it. Minkowski didn’t want to, either.”

“Sounds like you came from the shit timeline,” said Jacobi. “Man, that’s gotta be a real mopefest. You all were bad enough with just Hilbert dead. And with you coming back as an alien, and all—that was pretty gross, either way.”

“You didn’t know I was going to come back!”

“Nah,” said Jacobi, “you’re from the timeline that killed my best friend, so, fuck you. Tell her I said I’m sorry about the cheeses when you put her back in her cell tonight. Pretty please. You know. Since you guys killed her and all.”

“...Fine,” said Isabel. “Guess I can do that much.”

They fell silent after that, but no sound came down the hallway. Isabel didn’t know when the reset happened, but she hoped, very desperately, that it would happen sometime after midnight. If they were in the middle of the test when the reset occurred...

She began to doze off, catching herself every now and then, as the night wore on. Isabel checked her watch frequently. Eventually, there was snoring from the other side of the door.

22:34. 22:48. 23:13. 23:47.

It was 23:56 when Isabel heard the first sound in the hallway.

“Jacobi,” she said. “Jacobi, wake up. They’re back.”

He must have been a light sleeper, because she heard him very nearly instantly.

“What? What’s going on?”

“Minkowski’s got Kepler...”

Minkowski was frog-marching Kepler down the hall, as much as anyone could in zero-gravity, followed shortly by Eiffel, who had Maxwell in tow. Minkowski’s face was gray, and at first, Isabel thought it was the bright lights of the hallway. As the four of them approached, however, she began to realize—

“She’s out,” Minkowski said to Isabel, who felt the blood drain from her own face.

“Had it set pretty high!” said Kepler, and there was an edge to his voice, the way it’d been the day that his whiskey got blasted out through a hole in the wall. “Against my advice, I would like... to say. She should regain consciousness, in a few hours... but I’d advise you keep an eye on her until then.”

“For what?” asked Minkowski.

“What the hell’s going on?” asked Jacobi. “Where’s Maxwell? Hey—open this door!”

There was a banging from the other side, as if Jacobi really expected them to let him out. As if—Isabel opened her mouth to tell him that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell, but she was cut off by Kepler answering Minkowski. 

“For your own... edification, Lieutenant,” snapped Kepler. “We’ve got two moles on the station. Another one of you, Captain! Tell me, what do you think of returning to Earth now?”

And then, Isabel woke up, head swimming, her hand already reaching for her alarm clock.


	2. Chapter 2

“Good morning everyone, welcome to day 1093. Looking like another busy day on the Hephaestus, trying to get the nav systems up and running again—that’ll be Jacobi and Eiffel, with Dr. Maxwell on the telemetry receiver.”

Isabel unzipped her sleeping bag, feeling her way into the brightness of the morning. With the alarm clock going off, the lights in her room went on, too, as long as everything on Hera’s end was working correctly. One bulb flickered at the end of the room, but, overall...

Just another day on the Hephaestus. Everything was broken, there weren’t enough hands to fix all of it, and something that should have been, by all known physical laws, absolutely impossible, was happening. She groaned.

“Whoa,” said Hera. “You okay?”

“Fine,” said Isabel. “Bad dream, Hera. Hey, uh, can you tell me where everyone is?”

God, she hoped she hadn’t heard right—

“Jacobi, Eiffel, and Maxwell are all in the kitchen. Minkowski is at the other end of the telemetry receiver, trying to ping Maxwell. You know, I really don’t know if it’s a good idea to let them both out at the same time—”

“It’s fine,” said Isabel. “As long as Kepler’s locked up. Jacobi won’t try anything without Kepler’s say-so, and they haven’t had contact in...”

She tried to remember the facts she’d gotten from the others yesterday, but her head still felt strange. She tried to picture it, and the picture came easily. _Jacobi won’t try anything without Kepler’s say-so, they haven’t spoken in weeks. Maxwell won’t lead anything without Kepler’s say-so either, and has more to lose because we’re letting her try to figure out how to talk to the aliens_. _Maxwell’s excited_ , Isabel thought, _she’s been busy making notes even if she has to scrap them now that they know the aliens know enough English through me..._

It was a clear picture in her head, too, Maxwell scribbling away on a notepad in her lab and mumbling to herself over an audio log recorder. Isabel, still only half-awake, let her mind drift with the picture for a moment, _gotta restart everything, no binary needed_ , she thought she could hear, in Maxwell’s voice, as if she’d wandered past the lab while Maxwell was at work. _Their understanding of our syntax—_

“Yes, but,” said Hera, cutting her off, “it’s not Jacobi I’m worried about.”

 _You and me both_ , thought Isabel, trying to figure out in what world she would’ve set up the rotations this way.

“Hey, Hera. I gotta get downstairs, okay?” said Isabel. “But I get that you’re concerned. You and I can talk about this later.”

“...Sure, Captain,” said Hera, finally, “thank you.”

She got up, dressed as quickly as she could, tucked her hair back into the usual ponytail with no regard for any strands freeing themselves, and raced downstairs to the mess hall.

“Captain?” said Maxwell, immediately, as she entered the kitchen. “I... need to talk to you.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, “you do. The engine room, now.”

Jacobi raised his eyebrows.

“Wow,” he said, “demanding an audience with our captor. Who knew it was that easy?”

“Not now, Jacobi,” said Isabel, knowing that she wouldn’t have to wait too much longer for him to drop the subject, and watching his hand reach forward—

“Ow!” yelped Jacobi, zapping himself on the coil compressor, and Maxwell followed Isabel out of the room. “Maxwell, get a good deal for me, too! Forget the Colonel, though.”

“You got it!”

Isabel actually did go all the way to the engine room, where she knew they would be alone—Minkowski was making her rounds of the ship, and they’d see her coming a mile away, despite the fact that Maxwell protested.

“Recap,” said Isabel, and Maxwell nodded.

“I don’t remember much,” she said, “I think the psi-wave regulator knocked me out pretty early on, but, wow. So. I’m a duplicate.”

Isabel exhaled, a wave of relief washing over her.

“And you remember.”

She could’ve cried—she very nearly did, she thought, her throat tightened, and there was an ache in her chest. She wasn’t losing it. The time loop was real. It was happening, and it was happening to her, and to Maxwell, and no one else noticed.

“I do. Which brings us to the question of what I remember. Because I remember... Minkowski not pulling the trigger. I remember you getting shot, and then you coming back when we tried to have a funeral for you—I remember Hera was so angry at me, she still won’t speak to me, I remember that Hilbert’s dead, it seems like that’s all the same.”

“Yes.” 

Strange, thought Isabel, feeling detached, as if she was looking at this all from above. _I went through this all only three weeks ago, from my perspective, and I still don’t know what to tell her. I can’t even begin to know what will help._

And why should she have to, anyway? Why should she have to be kind to Maxwell, who would’ve just as soon seen her dead? They’d both died that day, and the only difference was that Isabel came back, and even now, that wasn’t any difference.

Hell, Isabel had figured it out. What was she supposed to do? Comfort Maxwell?

“And I can’t tell them,” Maxwell said, sounding perfectly professional, except for a slight waver in her voice. “I can’t tell Jacobi. I’d have to tell him again, tomorrow, and again the next day. And he won’t take it very well. He was so afraid, I think.”

Isabel was silent.

“They’re all afraid, of you,” said Maxwell, “and they’ll be afraid of me, too.”

“Tough,” said Isabel, before she could stop herself.

Maxwell looked her in the eye, and said, “Yes.”

Isabel didn’t know how to reply. She couldn’t meet Maxwell’s eyes any more, and instead, she pretended that she needed to brace herself against the nearest engine to prevent herself from floating away mid-conversation.

“Truce?” said Maxwell. “You haven’t been... confrontational. And I appreciate that. But we’re going to need a truce, if we’re going to get through this.”

“Truce,” said Isabel.

“Besides,” said Maxwell, dryly, “you can’t kill me, and I can’t kill you, unless we turn on the psi-wave regulator, and I don’t think I’ll be getting an opportunity to go anywhere near _that_ any time soon again, so... you’re the one who’s really on top, here. By the way, that _sucked?_ I feel like I have one hell of a hangover.”

Isabel didn’t  _want_ to feel bad about what she’d put Maxwell through, but she couldn't help but notice Maxwell was a little pale, a little wan-looking. But no matter how much she tried, she couldn’t help but think about what it would have been like, to turn on the psi-wave regulator, as interested as Maxwell had been in finding out. She shivered.

She didn’t know if she would’ve done it. Hell, she didn’t know if she would’ve done it to Maxwell again, and Maxwell was her _enemy_.

“You’re the one who’s still passing for human,” said Isabel.

“I’m imprisoned.”

“They’ll trust you,” said Isabel. “C’mon, you’ve got to at least see the value in that.”

Maxwell sighed.

“I don’t think we should try to tell them that days are repeating,” she said, finally. “I didn’t experience it before, but I did experience it this morning. Which makes me think that—”

She trailed off, and Isabel finished for her.

“That you really weren’t here before yesterday morning. That the star put you here.”

“But that would mean that it’s conscious,” she said.

“No,” said Isabel, “whatever mechanism is making the duplicates, is sending them—that’s what’s conscious. It can warp our memories, or the memories of the people on the ship, and it can make some of us experience days over and over, and some of us not notice the difference at all. Minkowski mentioned that she had experienced days repeating themselves, when no one else had, so I think that this isn’t just an alien thing.”

“It’s an _us_ thing,” said Maxwell. “I have to rewrite all of my notes! I was thinking we’d initially have to establish a yes-no code with them, but this is going to be way more complicated! That’s a shame, I was sort of looking forward to testing those theories out.”

She sighed.

“Are you reporting all of this to Kepler?” asked Isabel.

Maxwell swallowed.

“The Colonel is my commanding officer, not you,” said Maxwell. “In order for this truce to work—”

“In order for this truce to work, you can’t,” said Isabel, her heart beginning to pound. “You have to understand me, you cannot go to Kepler with this. If he’s experiencing the time loop with the rest of them, we cannot ask him about this, unless things get very, very desperate.”

“Hard feelings?” asked Maxwell. “He’s your best bet for information. I’m in Goddard’s intelligence division, though they did consider me for R&D, but anything relating to... whatever the hell you’d call this, would probably fall under Special Projects.”

“Yeah,” said Isabel, “and he was our best bet for not dying when the ship was falling apart, and look where the hell that got me? Come on. You’re with me—”

“—No,” said Maxwell. “Just because I’m an alien duplicate doesn’t mean I’m with you.”

Isabel shrugged, helplessly.

“Then who the hell are you with? Jacobi? He’s fucking terrified of what we are, you’ve seen him—”

“I’ve seen him terrified of you,” said Maxwell. “No offense, Captain, but you’re currently leading the resistance. And you shot Kepler’s arm off.”

“That wasn’t me!”

Maxwell crossed her arms.

“Look,” she said, “whatever I am, I’m still Alana Maxwell. Like you said. You’re whoever Isabel Lovelace is now. You can out me to the rest of the crew, which you already said was a bad idea, make them think you’re crazy again, and have just as fun a day as you did yesterday, or you can let me be an agent on the inside. Not yours. _An_ agent. And I can’t promise you that I won’t tell Kepler what’s going on.”

“Like I’d let you anywhere near him after this—”

Maxwell smirked.

“Oh, right. I suppose you’ve got me all locked up. Oh, _woe is me_. What _ever_ will I do? That’s _that_ , isn’t it?”

“We’re going back now,” said Isabel. “We’ve been gone long enough.”

“Right,” said Maxwell.

“And we’ll discuss this later,” said Isabel, which seemed to be the day’s main theme.

“We’d better,” said Maxwell.

* * *

 

“Hope you got us both at least a plea deal,” asked Jacobi, when they got back to the kitchen. “Oh, oh, and a really cushy jail cell.”

Maxwell snickered.

“Uh, you’re not getting the observatory,” she said.“I argued for that for me. But don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get a better lab to sleep in.”

How the hell could she do that, just... act as if they hadn’t just been fighting? How the hell could she be so calm? Isabel supposed it came with the territory of being a spy. God.

How the hell had it come to this?

“What the hell, Cap?” said Eiffel, and she couldn’t even be annoyed at him for it.

“It’s fine,” said Isabel, confidently as she could manage. “They’re just joking around, Eiffel. Maxwell had a engineering concern. It’s fixed.”

It wasn’t. They’d gotten no further to solving the issue of how the hell Maxwell was still here, she’d never had a worse headache in her life, and she was kind of... pissed, to be honest. As if she could just let Maxwell go to Kepler. As if she could just let Maxwell loose!

“You’re not going to be happy about the compressor coil,” warned Jacobi. “It’s pretty dangerous.”

“Ooh, maybe if it detonated,” said Maxwell, “then you’d be comfortable with it.”

Isabel snorted.

As pissed as she was, having Maxwell back was like a breath of fresh air. It was still tense, but she couldn’t possibly miss Jacobi’s bitter rage, or the real sharpness of everyone’s words—hell, having Maxwell around felt like normalcy again, and how fucked up was it that being surrounded by Goddard goons felt right, felt natural?

“Pass me the coffee,” said Isabel, and Eiffel launched a packet at her. “Thanks.”

Isabel slurped the coffee, watching things play out as usual. Minkowski called—

“How’s everything looking?” asked Isabel, and, when no one was looking, Maxwell gave her a slight nod. Goddard goons, she reminded herself, except that if the Goddard goon was telling her that she was doing the spy-vs.-spy acting-natural gig correctly, that was probably a good thing.

...Or maybe a bad thing. Isabel wasn’t sure how good she wanted to be at any of this.

“Good... really good,” said Minkowski, that same slow shock in her voice. “But I don’t wanna jinx it. Are you still fine with helping me with the compressor coil later on?”

“Sure,” said Isabel. “Glad to.”

“Thanks,” said Minkowski, “see you at noon.” 

The comms line closed, and Isabel turned back to her breakfast.

* * *

 

This time, Isabel took her time installing the compressor coil.

Minkowski hovered around the engine, holding things in place as Isabel hammered, or fought with the edges of the compressor coil to make it fit between the tubes and wires that comprised the rest of the engine. She was methodical, but cautious, despite the fact that she knew she could do this in an hour if she tried.

Minkowski let her be silent, too, which she appreciated, since it meant that she had some time to think.

“You have the dampeners?” asked Isabel, and Minkowski nodded.

She almost asked her again about taking command back, just to see if Minkowski’s answer would be different today, but of course it wouldn’t be. There was no reason for Minkowski’s answer to be different, it wasn’t as if anything had happened.

Minkowski, wordlessly, handed her the dampeners.

“You think it’s really a good idea to let Maxwell and Jacobi out so much?” asked Minkowski, and, hey, that was different.

Isabel shrugged.

It hadn’t been her decision, had it? Not really. Which meant, unfortunately, she was stuck defending the decision of a version of herself that she hadn’t been.

And yet, would she have done anything differently? She’d certainly let Jacobi out, in the world that she remembered. But that was just one against three, and okay, maybe Eiffel wasn’t so good in a fight, maybe Eiffel would be more of a liability than anything else, and she had no doubt that Minkowski would freeze if it came down to it and she got caught in a conflict again... Okay, yeah, honestly though, Isabel couldn’t see herself doing anything differently. An extra pair of hands was an extra pair of hands, and they all wanted to get home.

“Because I think it’s kind of hard on Hera,” said Minkowski.

Oh, shit.

What the _hell_ had this universe’s Lovelace been thinking?

“Lieutenant,” said Hera, “I really, really asked you not to talk about this.” 

“And I’m making an executive decision,” said Minkowski. “I think it’s not fair to you. And I don’t think it’s fair to the rest of us that she has such free rein. Would you even be able to tell us if she’d made any changes to you?”

“Of course not,” said Hera.

“All right,” said Lovelace. “Hera, I’m sorry. I... assumed that the benefits of getting home quicker with an extra pair of hands outweighed the costs.”

There was silence.

“Was I wrong?” asked Lovelace, quietly.

They couldn’t know anything was amiss.

“Captain, I wish I could block my visual sensors every time she walks into a room,” said Hera. “I don’t even want to hear her talk. This is my home, not Earth, and I don’t understand how you could even think to ask me that question.”

Minkowski wasn’t looking at Lovelace.

“So you do think I was wrong,” said Lovelace. “Minkowski?”

“Sir,” said Minkowski, “I would like to suggest that we keep Maxwell under stricter surveillance. I’d rather keep her in her cells during the day than ask her for help.”

Isabel felt ill.

“You know,” said Isabel, as cautiously as she could. “I think you’re right. She and Jacobi have been real chipper, too, and it’s not hard to see that they could be planning something.”

“The two of them could take out the four of us, easily,” said Hera, “you know that they could, Captain. It’s just not safe.”

 _And she’s the only one who knows enough about time and physics to get me out of this_ , thought Isabel, her head pounding, and her heart racing.

Well, besides Kepler, anyway, and like hell was Isabel going to ask him for help.

“Got it,” said Isabel, “I understand.”

She heard a sigh of relief, both from Minkowski and from the speakers.

“Starting tomorrow,” said Isabel, feeling ill, “I’ll give Maxwell a day in the cells, tell her that we’re restricting her movements.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Hera, and Minkowski nodded.

“Knew we could count on you,” said Minkowski.

* * *

 

“Maxwell,” said Isabel, urgently. “Hey, Maxwell.”

She heard a grumble from the other woman, who was currently buried in her sleeping rack.

“C’mon, I turned off Hera’s sensors in this part of the ship for a while. I really don’t have time.”

Maxwell’s head poked out, her eyes bleary and face puffy from sleep. Her hair was messy, but then, microgravity tended to make it kind of weird anyway, so Isabel couldn’t say that she really saw a whole lot of difference.

“You turned off Hera’s sensors?”

Like Maxwell was one to talk. Isabel was going to feel bad about it later, but for now... Oh, hell. Isabel hadn’t been built for this whole double-crossing thing. She felt bad about it _now_.

“Just for a couple of minutes,” said Isabel. “Look. I promised them I’d lock you up going forward.”

Maxwell rubbed at her eyes, and wiped at the corners of her mouth where, she had, indeed, been drooling in her sleep. There was something cute about her face, the way that she squinted when she tried to focus on Isabel, the way that she tried to surreptitiously stretch, as if Isabel wouldn’t notice.

“Cool,” said Maxwell. “The best kind of promise. One that no one will remember if you don’t keep?”

“Thing is,” said Isabel, “I think I have to. Hera doesn’t trust you. Neither does Minkowski. They don’t think you’re dangerous, like Kepler, but they’re afraid to... let you be alone with the controls. I think it could give me a leg up tomorrow. I think that’s what we need.”

Maxwell didn’t reply for a moment.

“You wanna keep me in here?” she asked, as if she was actually hurt. “C’mon, you know I can help!”

Isabel shook her head.

Maxwell snorted, and the lights flickered in the room, which meant that they had about thirty seconds before Hera went back online. Two seconds to get out of the room, a second to shut the door—Isabel calculated, which meant about twenty seconds of conversation left, just to be safe.

“You know,” said Isabel, “I’m not loyal to you. I can’t be. And I don’t even need your help. I can figure this out on my own. Once we’re out of the time loop, that’s when—”

“Hell no,” said Maxwell. “I’m the only teammate you’ve got in this. You can’t do this to me. I’ve got to investigate!”

“Don’t give me that crap,” said Isabel. “You’d do the same, if it was you in my situation, and you had Jacobi and Kepler asking you to keep me locked up. You know what? The only reason you remember being out at all? Our pals up there don’t _know_ me. They built me all over again, but they didn’t know what I’d do, and they made me look like an idiot in front of _my_ team. They had me, let _you_ out, like I’d fall for your alien linguistics studies _shtick_. Like I’d put my _friends_ at risk. Like I’d ask them to be chummy with you after what you _did_.”

Maxwell was silent for a moment, and the lights flickered again. Ten seconds.

“I thought you—”

“I’m sorry,” Isabel blurted out, before she could even think about how she meant it, before she could even think about the look on Maxwell’s face, the open-mouthed shock, and she pulled open the door again, and was out in the hallway. “I’m—”

“C-C-Captain?” asked Hera, accompanied by a short burst of static. “What are you—? You’re not in your room? Did I go somewhere?”

“Got the notification that you went offline,” said Isabel, “so I headed to the prisoners to make sure everything was okay here. Looks like it was just a momentary glitch, though. How’s the Urania treating you?”

“Uh, been better, but when it’s good, it’s great,” said Hera, “is everything okay here?” 

“Looks like,” said Isabel, feeling sick, and tired. “See you in the morning, Hera.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Maxwell,” said Isabel coolly, the next morning, “I’m going to need you go to back to your cell. I think we’ve got enough hands on deck today.”

She was met with cool resistance from Maxwell herself, with Jacobi’s narrowed eyes, and with Eiffel’s confusion. It wasn’t as if Eiffel wanted Maxwell out of her cell, either, as far as Isabel knew, he’d never really liked her. But Maxwell followed the order.

“Captain?” asked Hera, after Maxwell had left the kitchen.

She’d opted to give Maxwell the dignity of returning to her cell on her own. It was a hell of a test, but hey. Whatever they did would just be undone today, wouldn’t it?

“We’re running a tight ship today, Hera,” said Isabel, “oh, don’t look so upset, Eiffel.”

“Yes, sir,” said Eiffel, feigning a salute.

“Swab the decks,” said Isabel, because she knew it would make him laugh, and break some of the tension, and it did. To no one’s surprise, Jacobi didn’t laugh.

The comms went off, and she picked it up.

“Can you ping the telemetry receiver?” asked Minkowski, and Eiffel made his way over to the control panel.

“Pinged, Lieutenant!”

Then he burped, and Lovelace rolled her eyes.

“Hey, better out than in—”

“Oh, my God,” said Jacobi, “you could just say excuse me, like a normal person, instead of Shrek—”

Isabel sighed, and let the banter wash over her. _Get up_ , she thought idly, _get breakfast, at noon, head up to the engine room. Tell Minkowski everything is looking great. Install the coil compressor. Realize you’re so tired that you need to go to bed_. 

There was a key in there somewhere, she was sure. It didn’t need Maxwell, and, hell, Isabel almost wondered if Maxwell would even be there when she woke up on day 1094. She’d sort of thought that she’d figure it out when she got there, if she felt bad or not for leaving Maxwell behind, here, in day 1093. She’d sort of thought, frankly, that as soon as Maxwell was gone she’d look back on these few weeks and say good goddamn riddance.

But there was something that Isabel knew from her first time commanding the Hephaestus. You never, ever _didn’t_ miss the ones who were gone.

* * *

 

She brought Eiffel into the room with her today, in the hopes that maybe, this’d change things up enough that they’d snap out of it, whatever it was, but it didn’t really help that much.

Eiffel mostly just got in the way whenever she tried to install something. He really meant well, that was the thing—he really meant to help.

“Oh, my God,” said Isabel, head pounding, after the fifth time watching Eiffel try to screw in the braces to keep the coil compressor in place, and fumbling as they spilled off every which way across the engine room. “C’mon, man, get it together!”

“Sorry, sorry!” said Eiffel, and she could tell that he was getting frustrated, and she was getting frustrated, so she set everything down, strapped all the tools in place in the toolbox and plucked the nuts and bolts out of the air, zipped them back up in the bag, and shut the toolbox.

“Let’s sit for a sec.”

“Um,” said Eiffel. “Okay?”

“C’mon,” said Isabel, “we can play hooky. It’ll be fun.”

This earned her a laugh, and Eiffel smoothed back his mess of hair and leaned back.

“It’s 4:20 somewhere,” said Eiffel. “No weed in space, though. What are you even supposed to do when you play hooky if you don’t go off and get high in your buddy’s car?”

Isabel smiled, and Eiffel visibly relaxed.

“In this case, I think we can just chill,” said Isabel. “Take a nap, sit for a minute. The coil compressor’s not going anywhere. Minkowski thinks we’re making good time on the rest of the ship. Hera? Please don’t tell Minkowski I said we could take a break.”

“Noted, Captain,” said Hera.

“Hey,” said Eiffel, “aren’t you the commanding officer?”

Isabel shrugged.

“I keep expecting her to take it back.”

Eiffel shook his head.

“She’s not gonna,” he said, “and frankly, I can’t blame her.”

 _Well, I don’t want it either_ , thought Isabel, feeling that same annoyance rise up in her chest again. _I don’t want to be responsible for all of these people, I can’t, I can’t._.. 

She sighed.

“C’mon,” she said. “We’re not gonna worry about it, remember? We’re just gonna take a few minutes to chill. Ignore the coil compressor, ignore the ship, ignore the... command structure hierarchy question, which isn’t even going to be your problem anyway—just... relax.”

“What else even is there to think about?” asked Eiffel, and Isabel groaned.

“I used to go on spacewalks and listen to music on days like this. I bet those Goddard bastards got rid of my MP3 player.”

“No way,” said Eiffel, “you snuck an MP3 player on here? I mean, yeah, of course they got rid of it, that’s like, so 2003, but... nice.”

“I was allowed to bring it,” said Isabel. “What, wait, you weren’t?”

“Uh, no,” said Eiffel, except he looked away, like he was embarrassed, and Isabel let the subject drop. She tried another tack.

“So what did you do—”

“Not to interrupt your team bonding time,” said Hera, “but, I think you guys should know, I just lost connectivity to our prison ward.”

Isabel sat up, and so did Eiffel.

“You, get to Minkowski,” said Isabel, and Eiffel nodded. “Hera, where’s Minkowski?”

“In the old lab,” said Hera, and Eiffel nodded, and took off. “I can’t find Kepler, which means that he could be in the prison ward still, he could be somewhere in the Urania, or he could be making his way along some of the labs, or my—”

She paused.

“Your systems could be compromised,” said Isabel. “That’s okay. But it means that where you think the crew members are, might not be where they actually are, okay?”

“Und-derst-tood,” said Hera.

“Maxwell and Jacobi?” pressed Isabel.

“Jacobi is working on the Urania nav systems like he was supposed to be,” said Hera. “Maxwell is... missing.”

“Of course,” said Lovelace. “Thank you, Hera. If you catch Kepler, stop him, wherever you see him. And let me know right away. I might not go running there, okay?”

“Roger that, Captain.”

* * *

 

She took off down the paths of the Hephaestus. Minkowski would’ve been better for this, in some ways, she thought, except that Minkowski, bless her, would’ve gone off in the wrong direction. She’d try to neutralize the threat by going for Jacobi first.

 _If I were Kepler_ , she thought, and it was a gross thought, but it had to be, as Eiffel might have put it, thunk, _what would I do?_

_The... psi-wave regulator... Take out the commander, and the ship’s yours again! No matter what it does to your own crew._

It wasn’t exactly functioning, at least not today anyway, but then again, Kepler was the only one who could get it to work the way that it was supposed to. How the hell was she going to neutralize him, though? Upon second thought, she took a left, to get back to the Urania, and made her way to the armory. Isabel didn’t have time to think about what it had been like to float in here, hands tied behind her back, while Kepler’s voice rang out, echoing off all of the shiny, terrible weapons on the walls. It’d be a bad idea to kill him, as satisfying as it would have been, and so instead she took something that looked like it belonged in a Roadrunner cartoon: a gun that shot out netting, and a couple of tranquilizer darts.

Holding them in hand, she chuckled.

“Not the gun, Captain?” said Hera.

“Nope,” said Isabel, because she didn’t really care if Hera knew or if the others knew this. “We’re just gonna knock ‘em out.”

“Good luck,” said Hera, and her speakers went offline again. Isabel took her prizes and left.

But there was an apprehension that she felt this time, now that she was closing in on Kepler. She didn’t want to face the psi-wave regulator, not after the way that it had knocked out Maxwell. Hell, she didn’t even know if she could dodge it. She’d have to be sneaky, she’d have to try to creep up on them—

“Captain?”

“Oh thank God,” said Isabel, turning to find Minkowski. “Perfect. I needed a distraction.”

Minkowski’s eyebrows raised.

“You telling me that you don’t wanna take care of the counter coup we’ve got going on?”

“No,” said Isabel. “I mean you. Get in there, distract Kepler for a few minutes. Then I’m gonna introduce him to my two friends here, Net and Tranquilizer Dart, and then we’re gonna have our ship back.”

“Not so good with names, huh,” said Minkowski.

“I got better aim.”

Minkowski smirked, and oh, God, it was good to have a competent ally again...

“Hey, Hera?” asked Isabel. “Where’s Eiffel?”

“Looking for Minkowski still,” she said, “don’t worry, I’m keeping him away from where I think Jacobi is.”

“Okay, cool,” said Isabel. “Keep him busy. Minkowski, let’s move out.”

They crept down the hall, until they got to the corridor leading to the observatory, without further incident, and as much as Isabel might have appreciated Minkowski’s friendly banter, she knew that it was better to keep quiet. Minkowski motioned her forward, and then stepped into view of the doorway.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said, and presumably, Kepler looked up at that. She stepped into the room, and from there, Isabel could only see Minkowski. 

“A net?” said Kepler. “What is this, Scooby Doo?”

And he caught it handily, and turned it around, and launched it over Minkowski. The thrust of getting it that distance pushed Kepler back, too, just enough that Isabel could lunge forward. _Didn’t need aim, if your enemy was in arm’s reach_. She stabbed forward, and met resistance, but the dart stuck through the fabric, and remained when Isabel pulled her hand away.

Kepler glanced down.

“And you would’ve gotten away with it, too,” said Isabel, “if it weren’t for us meddling kids. Oh, Eiffel would love that one.”

“ _Brava_ , Captain Lovelace,” said Kepler, and promptly passed out.

“Oh, man,” said Isabel, unable to keep herself from smiling. “I thought we were gonna be speechified at, there for a sec. We lucked out.”

Minkowski shook her head.

“What the hell was that all about?”

Isabel nudged Kepler away from the console, away from the Urania’s psi-wave regulator, so he wouldn’t hit his head, or press any buttons accidentally. He bobbed gently, eyes shut and mouth open. If anyone had ever slept untethered, maybe it wouldn’t have been fucking creepy, but it was.

 _It’s Maxwell being pissed at me_ , she thought, but how the hell was she ever going to explain that to Minkowski? She sighed, and settled for, “Guess today they decided to make a break for it. Get to the psi-wave regulator, neutralize me—hey, at least they’re underestimating the rest of you—and get command of the ship again.”

“Wow,” said Minkowski, “so you were right to send Maxwell back to her quarters this morning.”

“Think it’s the other way around, actually, that’s probably what spurred this on,” said Isabel, and then, “oh, shit, did anyone ever find Maxwell?”

Minkowski’s eyes widened.

* * *

 

There was a brief zero-gravity struggle once Isabel entered the Urania’s armory for the second time that night.

Kepler was just the distraction, while Maxwell went for the weaponry to bring back to the others. She hadn’t been there before, which meant that she must have hidden somewhere else while Isabel raided for something to grab, and then, when Isabel was off to neutralize Kepler, she must’ve gone back. When Isabel got there, she was trying to balance a couple of big blunt objects, and reaching for something big and pointy.

Huh, to stun or maim, but not to kill. Isabel could appreciate that, at least, but she still lunged for the other woman.

Maxwell grabbed her, kicked off the nearest wall, and elbowed her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her—but Isabel was no slouch when it came to schoolyard fights, and Maxwell? Maxwell was a hell of an amateur. Isabel grabbed her hair, and Maxwell shrieked, clawing at her, but unable to make it. The weapons rolled in the air, and Isabel shoved them aside before they could come back up and hit her in the face.

And this time, Isabel successfully caught hold of Maxwell’s wrists.

“What,” said Isabel softly, as dangerously as she could manage—she’d gotten so good at that, in her early days back on the Hephaestus, striking fear into the hearts of Minkowski and the others— “the _hell_... have you done?”

Maxwell, who was, perhaps, more experienced in the arts of being intimidated than any of the second Hephaestus crew had been, didn’t even bat an eye.

“I’m trying to help! I told him—he said that he thought he might be able to knock us out of this rut that we’re stuck in—”

“And what the hell does that mean?”

“I told him everything!”

There was a silence, in which Maxwell tried, unsuccessfully, to kick Isabel.

“I can’t _believe_ you,” snapped Isabel. “It’s like you _want_ him to kill us. What the hell do you think he was going to do?”

“Oh, like you would’ve done any different,” said Maxwell. “If you knew what I knew about Goddard. C’mon. You know he’s the only one who can help us. I don’t know what he was going to do, but I believe in him.”

“I absolutely wouldn’t have let out the most dangerous man for both of us on this entire goddamn station—I wouldn’t have betrayed you like that! God! I wasn’t keeping you locked up to punish you, I was trying to make sure that I didn’t lose my own team’s loyalty!”

“What, you have morals?” asked Maxwell, and there was so much scorn in her voice, her mouth twisted in such a deep scowl that Isabel nearly flinched. “You were going to napalm me and the Colonel and Daniel to kingdom come, and you think you have the moral high ground just because we actually _did it?_ ”

“He killed me! He’s going to contact Goddard, and tell them what we are!”

“He can get us out of this time loop!”

“You’re probably right,” said Isabel, feeling her own heart sink, “but you know why I can’t let him take over this station again. Maxwell, how do you even know that he has your best interests at heart? How do you even know that he won’t just take you back, and experiment on you?”

Maxwell flinched at that, and Isabel almost felt bad.

“I may be a monster,” said Maxwell, voice low, and furious, “but I’m a monster who’s going to get us out of this. I won’t just sit around and wait for it to fix itself.”

“So you called in your boss to fix it,” said Isabel, “oh, don’t you feel like a big girl now? You can’t possibly think that he has your best interests at heart as he’s going to turn you in. You can’t have both.”

“Welcome to Goddard Futuristics,” snapped Maxwell.“At least I’m not afraid to ask for more information!”

Isabel really did flinch at that.

“You think that’s what this is about?”

“I do,” said Maxwell, “I think you’re afraid of what you’re going to find out from him. I don’t know why. I can’t imagine what would scare the great Captain Isabel Lovelace. But I think you’re afraid, and you’re not going to ask him, and until you do we’re just going to be stuck here!”

“Should’ve gone back to the timeline where you were dead,” muttered Isabel. “Maybe then I’d get out of here!”

Just another comment to regret, she realized, when she saw the look on Maxwell’s face.

Maxwell let her hands go limp in Isabel’s, stopped struggling against Isabel’s grip, and Isabel, as angry as she was at herself for what had just come out of her mouth,  _refused_ to be the woman that she had been when she had taken over the Hephaestus after being shot out of the star, the woman who had used blunt force to get her way, so she loosened her hands without letting go. Like this, now, they drifted closer together, until Isabel could see just how pretty Maxwell’s dark eyes were, could see every single freckle across her nose, could see the fierceness of the expression on her face as she spoke. Maxwell’s hair, still untied, brushed against her cheek.

She really thought she was doing the best thing, didn’t she?

Well, hell. How could she see that she wasn’t? How couldn’t she see that, of all of the goddamn dangers on this ship, Colonel Kepler was the long term big bad? Forget the aliens, Goddard was their enemy.

“You don’t mean that,” said Maxwell, voice low. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried. Don’t make a promise you can’t keep, Captain Lovelace.”

Isabel let go of Maxwell’s wrists.

“You’re right. I didn’t mean that,” she said, “but you sure as hell aren’t getting out again.”

Maxwell snorted.

“Maybe that’s the smartest thing you’ve done this whole time.”

 _It didn’t... feel like the smart thing_ , thought Isabel. It just looked like it from the outside.


	4. Chapter 4

Isabel slurped her coffee, watched Eiffel and Jacobi bicker over the compressor coil and who was going to get up and ping the telemetry receiver for Minkowski, and felt like shit.

It was for the best, she told herself, even though everything felt as horribly stifling as before, and her headache—which had begun to ease over the past couple of days—had returned in full, blinding force.

“Hey, what’s wrong, Cap?” asked Eiffel.

She groaned.

“...tain. Captain.”

Had she yelled at him about that today? She couldn’t remember, but probably she had. Either that or all the days were beginning to bleed together, like ink on wet paper. Maxwell hadn’t even come out of her room this morning. Hera had reported that she’d seemed under the weather.

“Just a headache,” she said.

“Like, an alien headache? Or the kind that some Tylenol could fix?”

She shook her head.

“Tried everything in the med kit, Eiffel.”

“Wow,” said Eiffel, “that long, huh? You seemed fine yesterday.”

“Did you try Dr. Hilbert’s—”

“You!” snapped Isabel, before Jacobi could finish that sentence, “ _shut_  it. Ping the telemetry receiver for Minkowski. Go.”

Jacobi got up, and pinged the receiver. Minkowski’s voice came through, but this time, Isabel let Eiffel talk to her, and let the day play out around her without her interference.

She wondered if that was the key. She sent Jacobi with Minkowski to install the compressor coil, much to his chagrin, and let Eiffel keep working on the nav system until the star charts were all up to date, she let Maxwell sit in her room, and she went back to bed.

Couldn’t hurt, could it?

* * *

 

When she woke up, she managed to sit through a brief report from Minkowski on the successful installation of the compressor coil, a brief report from Hera on the less-successful update of the star charts, and... nothing was different, except that it was dinnertime, and she wasn’t hungry and she didn’t want to be around the others.

She went back to the Urania’s storeroom where Maxwell was being kept, and opened up the doorway.

Maxwell barely looked up, still scribbling on the notepads that Isabel had given her. She hadn’t allowed the audio logs, since God only knew what kind of mischief Maxwell could get up to with a few loose electronics, but she’d been willing to give over pen and paper.

“How’s it going?”

Maxwell shrugged.

Like they hadn’t fought. Like it was nothing, like yesterday had just been... business.

“How much do you know about computational linguistics and logic theory?”

“Not much,” admitted Isabel.

“Then it’s going... okay.”

Isabel peered over her shoulder. Maxwell looked up, and Isabel thought she might have been imagining it, but Maxwell’s cheeks went pink, and she shoved the clipboard at Isabel.

She’d filled up the paper with a bunch of what looked like proofs, ever-expanding lines of—if Isabel remembered 7th grade correctly—all equivalent strings of information. Isabel had only been okay at math, and she’d stuck with the... less theoretical side of things. Figuring out the square inches of any shape, that was easy—things that she could see, and put together in her hands. Even if they were curved, even if they took a little memorizing to figure out. It was a skill that had served her well enough when building her ship—

—or maybe not, now that she thought about it. She rubbed at her temples.

“Headache?” asked Maxwell.

“Yeah. You too?”

Maxwell shrugged.

“Low grade. Not too bad. Probably because I haven’t been stuck in this as long as you.”

“Lucky you,” grumbled Isabel, and Maxwell laughed.

“Is it tension?”

Isabel shrugged. She was beginning to have the faint sensation of a trap closing in, only she didn’t know what kind. _I_ invented _being paranoid on this station_ , she thought to herself, irritably.

“I don’t know what it is. Why?”

“Wanna let me try something?” asked Maxwell, “I used to get headaches all the time. Turned out it was tension and the way that I was holding my neck. I’m not exactly a chiropractor, but I learned some things that helped. If you want...”

“I told you I wanted you dead yesterday,” said Isabel.

Maxwell shrugged.

“Then you said you didn’t mean it.”

Isabel crossed the room, feeling as though this was probably a great way to give her enemy access to her neck—all the better to break it—but hey, she’d come back, wouldn’t she?

She sat, hooking her knee around Maxwell’s desk leg to stay in place.

“Wow,” said Maxwell. “They told me you’d hold a grudge, but...”

 _No_ , thought Isabel. The old Isabel Lovelace, maybe. The in-between Isabel, the one who had changed without knowing it. Now, she  _knew_ that she was tired, and lonely, instead of just feeling it without having put a name to her emotions. Knowing didn’t make it better, of course. It just made it easier to do what she was about to do.

“Shut up and kill me or do whatever it is that will make this headache go away.”

“Okay,” said Maxwell, and Isabel felt her small hands close around Isabel’s shoulders, and then she felt Maxwell’s thumbs dig in, and then she felt—

“Oh, my  _God_ ,” said Isabel. There was a small crack, just at the base of her neck, and a kind of satisfying pressure that Isabel could feel all the way up to her throat.

“You go to MIT at age 16, you learn a few tricks about stress, but I used to do this for myself,” said Maxwell. Isabel let her shoulders down, slowly, from where she’d tensed them up, in anticipation of Maxwell’s touch. Maxwell’s thumbs dug in, on either side of each vertebrae of her spine, and Isabel let her head roll back. “And I used to do this for Daniel, too, sometimes, after a mission.”

_Daniel—?_

“Please don’t mention Jacobi, I’m trying not to be stressed out.”

Maxwell laughed. The pen floated down, and bumped against Isabel’s cheek, and she couldn’t be bothered to do anything but shut her eyes.

“Is it helping the headache?” asked Maxwell.

Isabel opened one eye, and immediately regretted it.

“No,” said Isabel. “But, uh, that doesn’t mean you have to stop.”

“M-hm,” said Maxwell. “Take notes. You owe me.”

“Sure, whatever,” said Isabel. “Oh, my God, right there.”

She could picture Maxwell’s smile, she thought, the way that her lips curved just a little more on the right, the way that, when she was about to say something sharp, there was just the briefest flash of teeth. Maxwell’s thumbs made their way down her back, and then back up, and then her fingers dug into the muscles at Isabel’s shoulders.

After a moment, Isabel rolled her shoulders, and Maxwell stopped.

“Better?”

Isabel shook her head.

“Can’t let you keep trying that,” she said, “I’d fall asleep in here, and then where would we be?”

There was a look on Maxwell’s face, the barest hint of the smirk that Isabel was used to seeing there, that Isabel—Isabel felt her own cheeks heat up.

“I gotta go,” said Isabel, suddenly.

Maxwell’s smirk faded.

“I uh, owe you, though,” said Isabel, because there was a pretty girl standing in front of her, and God help her, enemy or not, Isabel wanted to make her smile, “catch you later.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” said Maxwell, turning back to her papers. “Catch you later.  _Cap_.”

Isabel only felt the blush fade when she’d made it all the way back to her own quarters.

But that night, when she fell asleep, it was deep, dreamless, and restful. 


	5. Chapter 5

She woke up the next morning, determined to play out the day however it was supposed to go. Trying to do nothing hadn’t worked. Action, inaction, it all felt the same at this point, all desperately futile, but at least now Isabel had gotten the tiredness out. She could still feel where Maxwell’s thumbs had dug into her spine. She felt, she genuinely hated to admit it, ready.

She just wished she knew _what for_.

That meant hitting her alarm and getting out of bed—not rolling her eyes at the thousandth version of Hera’s Day 1093 spiel, it meant going downstairs and ignoring Eiffel’s burping, and letting Jacobi zap himself on the goddamn coil compressor. It meant ignoring Maxwell’s cautiously blank expression, and the way that she looked away from Isabel.

It meant sitting down at the table and eating reconstituted bacon and eggs like her life depended on it, even though she was ready to puke it all back up, with the way her head was throbbing. She felt dizzy, but that was just an issue with the way that microgravity messed with your head.

“Captain?” asked Jacobi. “Hello, Hephaestus to Captain Lovelace, what’s gotten into you today?”

“Huh?” said Isabel.

“We’ve been trying to call you for like, five whole minutes,” said Eiffel. “What the hell are you doing up so early?”

“Nothing, really,” Isabel said, trying to remember why the hell she’d gotten up this early on the first day anyway. “Just felt like it, I guess. Things are looking up, aren’t they?”

Maxwell met her eyes, and Isabel tried to ignore how her cheeks went warm, the way that Maxwell’s hair seemed to float around her face like they were underwater.

“Yeah,” said Maxwell. “Hope so, right? Not feeling so... stuck in a rut?”

“Maybe I’m just getting used to it,” she said.

“Well, uh,” said Eiffel, “if you wanna go back and catch more rack time, you can... totally do that...”

“Nope,” said Isabel, “I’m gonna go run some checks on Hera’s system, and then I’m gonna relax for a bit, and then Minkowski and I are gonna work on that coil compressor. Right, Minkowski?”

“You got it,” said Minkowski. “Everything looking ship-shape, Captain? You sound like you’re in a good mood.”

Isabel tried not to meet Maxwell’s eyes, tried not to be too obvious.

“Just feeling kind of hopeful, I guess,” said Isabel.

“Must be nice,” said Maxwell, a smug smile on her face, and Eiffel rolled his eyes.

That was that.

“Maxwell, take the day off,” said Isabel, hoping desperately that the feigned graciousness of the gesture would be enough to keep Maxwell from feeling as though she’d been put on time-out, while still being enough to keep Hera feeling as though the woman who’d rummaged around in her head wasn’t running free. “We’ve got enough hands on deck. Jacobi, you stay with Eiffel. Don’t shock yourself again, I need you in good form for working on the engines later.”

Maxwell snorted. But she left.

 _It wasn’t as if I wanted to_ , thought Isabel, somehow more hurt by that than anything else. _It wasn’t as if she’d_ —

Ah, hell. Maxwell was her prisoner right now, wasn’t she? That made this thing between them, this uneasy truce, dangerous. She didn’t owe Maxwell anything except a decent captivity, and Isabel’d had lots of practice with that, with the second Hephaestus crew. She’d been a very good captor, except for the part where she’d told them that if they did anything she didn’t like she’d blow up the station.

Maybe it was monstrous. 

Isabel sighed.

Time to be a monster, then. She’d always had it in her.

* * *

 

“Time,” said Isabel.

“Time,” repeated Kepler.

Okay, fair, she wouldn’t be able to get much information from him if she didn’t give anything.

But hell, she’d never been an interrogator! It wasn’t as if she’d been that evil, even when she’d taken over the Hephaestus the first time! She sighed.

“Time... loops,” tried Isabel. “What if I thought I was in one?”

Kepler frowned, and tilted his head to the side.

He was starting to grow something like stubble. He’d always had a sort of permanent five o’clock shadow look, like he’d been drawn that way from the beginning, but now, Isabel could see that his beard would be gray, if they ever got out of this time loop and it was allowed to continue to grow. He didn’t rest in his sleeping rack, but floated in his cell, staring up at what amounted to a ceiling, in the direction that they’d all agreed upon as up.

“But why... would you come to me? When one of the brightest scientists from Earth is one cell over?”

Isabel shrugged.

“Maybe ‘cause you know more about Goddard than Maxwell does.”

“Ah,” said Kepler.

“Said she didn’t do that kind of research back at Goddard, but, with the state of things and our big blue friend acting up, she really wishes she had.”

“So. You suspect you’re in a time loop?” said Kepler.

“Something like that,” said Isabel. “Or I got dumped in an alternate dimension. Thing is, I remember a timeline where Maxwell died.” 

If this made him feel any emotion, at all, Isabel didn’t see it. _Fucking bastard_ , she thought.

 _And then, maybe I wouldn’t have said anything, either. Not to the enemy, not to my captor_. She tried to remember how she felt when Hui and Fourier died, how she’d never spoken of them again after Hui had been shut out the airlock, after they’d realized that Fourier wasn’t coming back. But Kepler... seemed to already have that airlock at the ready, with a few trite words of condolence.

“How... unfortunate. Such a promising young person. Shame to lose a mind like that.”

“You’re telling me,” said Isabel.

He let a long pause hang in the air, as usual, before he replied.

“All our research indicates that things tend to... stay the same. If the actors are the same, if the script looks the same, if it’s on the same stage... the play’s gonna look _reeeal_ familiar.”

“But what if we added an actor,” said Isabel, “and no one else in the play seems to have noticed?”

Kepler shrugged.

“Maybe you’re in the wrong play. You sure you got the right stage?” He snorted. “Then again, I’m... not sure what it is you think you’ll gain by talking to me. Perhaps we could make a deal? I could try a few... _ideas_.”

“Not a chance.”

“Suit yourself. You got any other questions, feel free to ask.” He let the pause hang in the air, as usual. Isabel could tell it was one that he was real proud of. “But I’m afraid you won’t get any real answers... for free.”

Isabel thought of the other timeline—the one that had started looping, with Jacobi, sharp and bitter, constantly reminding them that he would just as soon have any of them dead. With Minkowski, an anxious wreck, eyes wide with guilt any time Jacobi opened his mouth—Hera, furious with Maxwell, glitching every other word whenever the name came up—with Eiffel, slinking around like a scolded dog.

And no Maxwell.

God, Maxwell was their only hope, wasn’t she?

She knew how to communicate with something that wasn’t human, she knew Hera, she was excited to solve these problems. Hell, Isabel thought, maybe that was even why she’d been brought up here in the first place. Eiffel didn’t want to be a part of any of it, either. And it wasn’t as if Communications Officer had ever been a real job, anyway, based on what Hilbert had said. He’d just been lucky enough that he’d stumbled across the messages.

No, they needed Maxwell. Jacobi’d been right, more than he knew.

Of course, she wasn’t human, either. But what better translator than a native speaker? Maybe their friends from beyond the star hadn’t put Maxwell back for the Earthlings—maybe they’d put her back for them. But that wasn’t the mystery that Isabel wanted to solve. It was better left in Maxwell’s hands.

No, she needed to get them out of this time loop. _That_ was what she could do, even if Maxwell was the brains. All of that alien problem-solving ability, that she’d initially intended to turn on just getting them home. She sighed.

And then a final question occurred to her, before she could think about what it meant.

“What if I don’t want to be in the other play?” said Isabel. “What if I think this one maybe has a better chance of a happy ending?”

Kepler shrugged.

“Then write it your goddamn self,” he said.

* * *

 

She eventually dragged Maxwell in the observatory of the Urania, when Eiffel had been suitably distracted with the ship’s navigation system and star charts and Minkowski trying to teach him how to work all of them, and Jacobi had been locked back up in his cell.

Isabel knew it was coming when Maxwell squinted at her.

“What’s up?” said Maxwell, “I may be pissed as hell at you, but I want a breakthrough, just as much as you do. I can tell this isn’t just a theoretical discussion. You’ve got a weird look on your face, like something happened.”

“...I talked to Kepler,” said Isabel, straightening up.

She was steeling herself for a—fight, maybe, or even Maxwell to stomp off. She wasn’t sure what she was prepared for, just that—

Instead, Maxwell shrugged.

“Yeah, I thought you should,” she said. “Glad you came around, Captain. What’d he say?”

Isabel fumbled for the wrench she’d brought to make sure the control panel was correctly wired, which she very nearly dropped.

“Time’s weird,” she said.

“Okay,” said Maxwell. “So, what’s new?”

“I told him that I thought time was looping—okay, so I told him that yesterday, so he doesn’t remember today,” said Isabel. “He started rambling about actors on a stage. Seems like Goddard’s been doing some experiments, and time is like... a script. You can fall into a rut.”

Maxwell’s eyes lit up.

“Oh no,” said Isabel, “oh, no, please don’t ask me anything scientific. I’m here for my military expertise, Doc. I can install a coil compressor, that’s about it.”

“Can I—”

Isabel winced.

“Please don’t ask Kepler. You know I can’t let you go in there and confer with him. I just, I’m trying to think about what it means, and I wanted to tell you.”

Maxwell sighed.

“You’re gonna have to let me talk to  him,” she said, “now that you know—”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Later.”

“I really want to be on your side,” said Maxwell.

Isabel searched her face, for a long moment.

“No, you don’t,” she said.

Not for the first time, though, she wished that Maxwell was. Maxwell sounded like she meant it, too, all wide brown eyes and earnest frustration.

“I do! I hate this just as much as you do—”

“But you’d still turn me over to them the instant we get back to Earth. They won’t know, you know, unless they pull out a psi-wave regulator on me, and you can do your best to prevent that from happening. But Kepler already knows about me. Jacobi already knows about me—”

“You think this is still about sides?” asked Maxwell.

“You think it’s not?”

Maxwell leaned in, and Isabel knew what was coming. Oh, God, she couldn’t be serious, could she? She couldn’t possibly—

Her nose brushed against Isabel’s cheek, she knew what that meant, she felt Maxwell’s breath against her cheek, the faint smell of toothpaste.

“Do you—”

“Oh my God,” said Isabel, “it’s been—”

How long had it been? Since—Earth, since... girls whose names she didn’t care enough to remember, girls who weren’t waiting for her back home. Never, she realized, no one had ever touched this Isabel Lovelace, no matter what memories she had, no matter how familiar this might have felt.

“Is that a no?”

“It’s not,” said Isabel, and she closed the gap, and kissed Maxwell.

Maxwell kissed her back, smiling into the kiss, and Isabel opened her mouth and found that Maxwell’s hands felt just right, when Maxwell rested them against her cheek.

Ah, crap. Isabel felt her shoulders relax, felt Maxwell’s hand slide around her waist and pull her closer, until they were nestled together—

Weird, how easy it was for a kiss to become something else. This wasn’t a first-date doorstep kiss, the kind of kiss you got when there was probably going to be a second date, but your date was about to head home. Isabel... hadn’t had too many of those kisses in her life, but this sure as hell was not one of them. Here, in the quiet of the Urania’s observatory, there was a kind of fervency to it, a disastrous, sprawling kind of relief, a dam breaking, or maybe the way that all of a person’s muscles relaxed when they fell asleep and dreamed of falling, only without the feeling of catching yourself—

Could be a ploy, Isabel thought, could be, just like Kepler’d said about her. _A spy so good they don’t even know they’re a spy, someone who’ll betray everyone and doesn’t even know it, a weapon who thinks they’re your friend_.

Isabel cupped Maxwell’s cheek in her own hand, letting the kiss slow down, until Maxwell nipped at her lip—

Her breath caught in her throat, God, Maxwell could kiss.

“Goddard sent a damn good honeypot,” she murmured, and Maxwell smiled.

“Tell that to Kepler, he took one look at me and decided that I wasn’t allowed to go on that kind of mission.”

“Like I’m supposed to believe that.”

Maxwell shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter to me if you believe it or not. This isn’t a Goddard honeypot. I like you. I want to work together to figure this out.”

“I never know which is the real you,” said Isabel. “The one that goes behind my back, the one that fights—or _this_ —the one that fixes my friend, or—”

Maxwell ran her thumb along Isabel’s cheek.

“Both, Captain Lovelace,” said Maxwell. “Always both. That’s Goddard. Get used to it, you’re in it now. I really was sorry about Hera, you know.”

Isabel shut her eyes. Maxwell could sound so _earnest_.

“Sorry doesn’t feed the pig, but you can call me Isabel,” she said, a little hoarse, and Maxwell nodded.

“Alana.”

Alana leaned backwards, and rested her hand against—

“Haha, oops,” said Alana, and she pulled her hand back from the psi-wave regulator switch. “Uh, that would’ve really sucked, if I’d turned it on.”

Isabel stared at it, and then she glanced up at the time. A couple minutes to midnight. Like Cinderella at the ball, she thought. Like the night Kepler got out, and went for the observatory...

 _No real answers for free_ , she thought, and began to laugh. It bubbled up out of her, low and cold, the way that it had when she’d set the bomb in herself and felt it ticking with every heartbeat. Maxwell raised her eyebrows.

“Turned it on and knocked both of us out?” Isabel asked.

“Yeah,” said Alana, “I can tell you, that was not fun.”

“Neutralizing the part of us that makes us not-human?” asked Isabel, “The part of us that makes us capable of experiencing the time loop? Hey, tell me I’m not crazy.”

Alana’s eyes went wide.

“You are,” she said, with a gasp, “you  _are_  totally crazy. I woke up the day after, and we were still in the time loop, but I remembered everything.”

“Yeah, but  _I_  wasn’t neutralized,” said Isabel. “So maybe it still loops if either one of us is in commission. Anyway, you didn’t even  _have_  any time loops before then. What could it hurt?”

“Do you even know what prolonged exposure to this could do to us?” demanded Alana. “Because I sure as hell don’t!”

“Two more minutes to decide,” said Isabel, “then we gotta do all of this all over again tomorrow.”

“We can  _wait_  24 hours to decide,” said Alana, as her voice got higher-pitched, “we can think this through!”

Isabel leaned down, and kissed her again.

However frantic Alana had gotten, she kissed Isabel back like it was nothing, her hand crept up, and wound gently in the hair at the back of Isabel’s neck, and Isabel wondered what it would be like to let go of the psi-wave regulator switch and hold Alana with both arms again. They could kiss in microgravity, she could let their legs tangle together and there would be nothing stopping them from—

The clock flipped to 23:59. Alana still held her there, but made no move to pull Isabel’s hand away from the switch.  _One-one thousand_ , thought Isabel,  _two-one thousand, three-one thousand, four one-thousand_ , and was she counting the seconds too slowly, how many breaths did she leave between them,  _oh my God, was that Maxwell’s—Alana’s tongue_ —

She flipped the switch.

It hummed slowly, first only a vibration under her fingertips, and then, as it slowly began to grow audible, the kiss broke off.

“Sorry,” said Isabel. 00:00.

Alana began to laugh, and as the humming of the psi-wave regulator (maybe it really had been stupid to do this so close to the thing) grew louder it began to mess with Isabel’s vision. Alana let go of her and mouthed something. If Isabel’d had a guess, it would’ve been  _goddammit_ , or maybe  _Captain Lovelace_ , and, hey, if it was her name then she’d always wanted to be the last curse on someone’s lips, but she hoped like hell that they weren’t going to die like this, and as her vision tunneled out completely she saw the clock flip to 00:01.


	6. Chapter 6

“Welcome to Day 1094.”

Isabel opened up the unfamiliar sleeping bag before she even processed the words, feeling her heart pound so hard that she thought she might be literally having a heart attack. This wasn’t her room—

“You’re in the medbay,” said Hera, a strange, clipped tone to her voice. “Just in case. You didn’t seem to have any complications, but Minkowski was worried, anyway. She kept watch all night, and then it was Eiffel’s turn, and now, it’s mine, so they can both rest a little bit. You gave them a scare.”

“Where’s Maxwell?”

“Woke up 2 hours ago,” said Hera, “So, I have a lot of questions. And I _am_ hoping you’ll give a few of them answers. How did I not know that you were meeting with  _her_?”

“What... happened?” asked Isabel.

“Well, around 1 a.m., when I realized you weren’t in your rack, we went looking for you and Dr. Maxwell. We found both of you, unconscious, by which I mean Jacobi found both of you unconscious, and he and Minkowski brought you here.”

“Time was looping,” said Isabel.

“Well, at least you have Dr. Maxwell backing you up on that, and Minkowski agreeing that it’s possible,” said Hera.

“How’s Eiffel?”

“Freaked,” said Hera, but her tone softened. “I think he wouldn’t mind hearing from you. I think he was worried you guys were trying to... knock yourselves out of commission. For good.”

“Just trying to break the time warp thing,” said Isabel. She climbed out of the sleeping bag, and realized that every single muscle in her body ached. “Oh, geez.”

“Minkowski had to break the psi-wave regulator,” said Hera. “She couldn’t get it to turn off. There could be some complications.”

“There was a switch,” sighed Isabel. “I wonder if we can fix it.”

“Doubt it. She broke the junction between the amplifier and the generator, and we don’t have another one of those.”

“Is-is Maxwell okay?”

Any softness in Hera’s tone vanished.

“Go see for yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Hera,” said Isabel, and it began to pour out. “I didn’t want to lie to you, or to hide things from you while we were on the Hephaestus, but I didn’t think you would believe me, and she did, and—”

There was a long, drawn-out sigh.

Isabel waited.

“I know how that is,” Hera said, finally. “She’s good at that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

It was, in all honesty, the best that Isabel could hope for, and she got up to find Alana.

 

* * *

 

“‘Morning,” said Isabel.

“Well, it’s not the best one I’ve ever had,” said Alana, “but I can’t complain. At least it is a morning, and it’s  _new_. You were out for so long, though. Are you okay?”

She reached up, and reached for Isabel’s forehead. Isabel let her check for a fever, let her rest the back of her hands briefly against Isabel’s cheeks, until she was satisfied.

“No other symptoms? Nothing feels wrong, or funny?”

Isabel caught Alana’s wrists, and brought her hands down.

“I’m fine,” she said, and then she began to laugh. “I can’t believe you let me do that.”

“I can’t believe it worked,” said Alana, and she huffed out an exasperated sigh. “I was going to get out all of my logs, and go over everything we knew, and I was going to see if I could use the Urania’s computers to run through some scenario’s—sorry, Hera, I didn’t think you’d let me use your processors—and you just _flipped a switch_ —”

There was only static from the speakers, which had never happened before, and which gave Isabel the sinking feeling that Hera was trying to drown them out so that she couldn’t hear the conversation.

“I like my way better,” said Isabel.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Alana, but she was laughing, too, in that pretty, throaty way that she had.

Hera coughed.

“I spoke to the Colonel,” said Alana, after a moment. “He’s thinking. I think. He can’t communicate with Canaveral, but I... don’t think he wants to. Daniel’s scared for me.”

Isabel raised her eyebrows.

“And you’re telling me this... why?”

“Because I think you should know,” said Alana. “Because you’re still the Captain, and because you are in control of the ship, and because I’m...”

Isabel was not an optimistic woman, but even so, she waited, breath caught in her throat, to hear,  _on your side_ —

“Going to try to make this work,” Alana finished. “We’re going to find out what they want. For me. And we’re going to get home. For you. Okay?”

It wasn’t... exactly what Isabel wanted to hear, but she reached out for Alana’s hands, and Alana did the same in kind, until they were pulled together, fingers laced. Hera’s warning still echoed in her head, but Isabel ignored it, and wondered if she would regret it later on.

“Both,” agreed Isabel, and leaned forward to give Alana a kiss. 


End file.
